untitled
an excerpt

As soon as the night security guard opened the door Linus shot him in the left eye. The silencer made little noise. The guard made none.
He took the key ring out of the guard’s still-clinched fingers and locked the double glass door entrance behind him. Linus looked the foyer over quickly. There was an unmarked door behind the security desk. He dragged the guard by his armpits to the door, opened it, quickly registered the fact that it contained some janitorial supplies and kicked the body in.
After securing the door, he wandered over to the elevators and read the directory hanging next to them. Brand securities was listed on the third floor. Linus took the stairs.

As it turned out Brand Securities was the entire third floor. It took Linus nearly half an hour to find the correct office and another ten minutes to find the file he was looking for.
Case File: Anthony M. Glickman. (B Clarkson reporting) Current whereabouts: Chicago. Surveillance Length: 2 wks. Subject originally checked into Hotel Chateau (“Hotel Hotel”?) in Lakeview neighborhood 3/21. Moved after one night to a motel in the Uptown neighborhood. Moved to nights later to the Chandler Royale (South Loop; see page 3). 50% of subject’s nights are spent bar-hopping. No discernable pattern re: dives and/or neighborhoods he frequents. Subj. is usually on best behavior on these trips, generally remaining as unobtrusive as possible, acting the very definition of a “sad drunk”. Rejected/ignored advances by 4 female bar patrons and 1 male bouncer. All other nights subj. stays in. Daytime movements even more infrequent. Probably sleeps in. No set patterns beyond eating meals at Og’s Diner (200 S LaSalle).
Linus stopped there. Chicago, he thought. The little shit’s in Chicago. He flipped two pages ahead to the information on the Chandler Royale. There were photos, written descriptions. The faded glory was sad and dingy. Just like Glick. As he pocketed the file the office lights snapped on.
Linus cursed himself for his stupidity and then turned around as unthreateningly as possible. He relaxed, only a little, when he found he only had one visitor.
An average-looking man wearing an average-looking suit and a bemused expression was studying him. His right hand was still on the doorknob. “You’re not the maid,” he said.
“She’s in Oxnard. Visiting her sister,” Linus said.
The man took a step forward. “You can drop the act. There’s a one-eyed security guard in the closet downstairs. I’m guessing that’s your work.” Suddenly there was a .32 in the man’s right hand. Even Linus was impressed. “Take the gun out of your jacket, very slowly, by the butt.”
Linus did as he was told.
“Drop it. Kick it over here.”
Again, Linus complied. The man picked it up – never taking his eyes off him – and dropped it in his suit pocket. “I’m guessing you’re not a corporate spy. They’re usually not so…murderous. I’m curious, though. Before we get some law in here maybe you can satisfy my curiosity.”
Linus faked a huge yawn.
“Fine. Have it your own way.” The average-looking man, who had no next-of-kin, pulled out a pair of handcuffs from another suit pocket. “Turn around and place your hands on the desk.”
Linus turned around and placed his hands on the desk. He heard the man walk up behind him and watched as a handcuff was looped around his right wrist. Standard. Predictable. As his right arm was brought around his back, he quickly followed it’s momentum and stabbed the man just below the breastbone with the hunting knife he’d had hidden up his left sleeve. he then wrenched the gun out of the man’s hand. The guy was too busy staring comically at the knife sticking out of his chest to be of any further threat.
“Uh…uh…uh,” he said.
Linus drove the knife further into the man’s chest and then savagely ripped the hilt downwards. The man’s uh’s were replaced with gurgling noises. Something warm and wet splashed onto Linus’s shirt, ruining it.
Linus didn’t care, turned the knife.

I finished shaving, ran my hands under the faucet, filling them full of water, dunked my face in them, quickly rubbed my face dry with the flimsy hotel washcloth and grinned at the bloodshot eyes that stared at me in the mirror.
“You fail,” I told my reflection.
I barely registered putting on my shirt and coat, then dragging a comb over my hair. I stepped out of the room, a day full of possibilities ahead of me. After locking the door I leaned my head against it, breathing heavily.
What am I doing?
A loud moan from across the hall roused me. A quick look around revealed no one else in the corridor, then who - ?
Martin.
Martin – who lived in the room across mine – was sleeping through another drunk. He had night terrors or DTs or some shit. He was weaker than me.
I gave my neighbor a sympathetic gunman’s salute, hoping the snakes in his brain wouldn’t rattle around too much, then headed down the stairs. I lived on the second floor. No need to call the elevator.
As I crossed the tiny lobby another hotel inhabitant, a black kid about ten years younger than me, came in from the cold. “Mornin’, man,” he said. I feigned a combination of indifference and grogginess and didn’t acknowledge his existence as I passed him. Somewhere behind me a muttered “Jerk.” floated in my direction.
I started hating people early today.

The diner looked filthy from thirty feet away. Sticky, grease-spattered windows. Decades of pigeon crap on the awnings. I wondered why I kept coming here. No. Scratch that. I knew exactly why. It was the closest to the hotel.
Time to broaden your horizons, Timothy old boy, old chap, old bean. You’ve graced every watering hole from Rogers Park to Pilsen, but this is the only place you care to eat?
I found myself walking past the diner just like that. I would broaden my horizons.
Careful, boy. next thing you know you’ll start clipping your fingernails with gardening shears, brushing your teeth with brillo, or even more crazily enough, turning teetotaler.
No.
No. Let’s take things slowly. One step at a time and all that. Baby steps baby steps baby steps.
I had no way of knowing I was about to take the worst baby step of my life. Or the best, depending on your point of view. God, that sounded so clichéd.
I found a Pancake House-type joint. Made a change from soggy patty melts, I suppose. A kid wearing a frumpy outfit and a tired smile found me a table in the No Smoking section, handed me a menu and went away. I shrugged off my coat and scanned the menu. Five seconds later somebody slid into my booth. I looked up into the grinning face of Ant.
Fuck.

Linus looked down at the whore as he zipped up. “You’re very talented,” he said. The confining rest room stall amplified the volume of his voice.
“I told you not to pull my hair, you asshole,” the whore said as she got up off her knees. she wiped her chin with a bit of toilet paper, then threw it in the bowl. “I think I should get extra for that.”
“Sure thing. Will an extra fifty cover it?” He pulled out a Ulysses S Grant and waggled it in the air, grinning like a benevolent father. The whore’s face lit up. Until Linus threw the bill into the toilet. She dropped her purse and started to bend down to retrieve the money. “Once an asshole…,” she muttered.
“Famous last words, sweetie,” Linus said. The whore started to turn around in reaction but he grabbed her by the neck and shoved her face into the toilet bowl. Her legs splayed out and started to kick feebly, the slippery floor of the stall giving her no opportunity to right herself. Her hands beat the sides of the stall impotently.
Linus unzipped his pants.

Two minutes later he exited the rest stop men’s room and crossed the deserted parking lot to his pick-up truck. The chilly desert air was refreshing after the ammonia/urine odor combination of the rest room. This early in the morning there wasn’t any traffic from the nearby highway. Linus almost felt like the only person in the universe.
He reached in through the passenger side of the truck and picked the map out of the seat. Something small and shiny caught his eye. He picked it up, too, and took a closer look at it. The whore’s lipstick. After Linus had pulled into the rest stop, she had approached him. She had sat in the cab with him, listing the various services she could provide him along with their costs, all the while applying paint to her lips like some dainty schoolgirl. She hadn’t known then that the last thing she’d be kissing was the inside of a piss-filled toilet bowl. Linus threw the lipstick into some brush and unfolded the map onto the hood of the truck. He was just outside of Reno and figured he could make it to Chicago in two days. If he behaved himself. He didn’t want to behave himself, but he didn’t want to lose Glick either. After he had killed the private detective he had put the file on Glick back in it’s place so the authorities couldn’t draw a line between the two of them. But he couldn’t rely on the twerp to stay at the Royale for long. For all he knew, he had already checked out.
Linus knew, though, that he’d need to do someone else soon. Despite what he’d done to the whore. It wasn’t enough. Absently, he recalled the newspaper story he’d read that afternoon in the diner. The story about the “shocking” and “brutal” murders of security guard Phil Valance and Brand Securities employee Bill Clarkson. My work, he thought and smiled.
A sudden peal of tires. The sound of someone’s too-loud stereo bass shaking the car’s frame jolted Linus out of his reverie. A flashy white sports car was entering the rest stop. It slowed to a stop. Even though he and his truck were on the far side of the lot, half-hidden by the rest rooms and not under a street light, Linus started to feel very conspicuous.
The driver of the sports car tooted his horn twice. That tore it. Linus folded the map and got in the truck. He started the engine and pulled out of the rest stop. He didn’t turn on his lights until he was on the highway.

I hadn’t liked Linus the moment I’d met him. It was obvious he felt the same towards me. Our “relationship” only went southwards from there.
Ant had invited me over to his place one night. He and Linus were killing zombies on his Xbox360 when I came in. “Hey, bro,” he said without taking his eyes off the screen. “Brew’s in the fridge.”
“Get me one,” Linus said as I started towards the kitchen.
“Please is such a small word,” I said, “And it doesn’t cost a thing to say.”
I should’ve just gotten him his damn beer. Or I should’ve just pretended to forget his request and made him get it himself. Or I should’ve stripped myself naked, painted myself purple with orange polka-dots and climbed the walls, screeching in pig Latin. Or a thousand other things instead of making that remark like a mouthy little prick. Without missing a beat Linus said, “This that writer faggot you were talkin’ to me about, Ant?”
And there it was. That one moment crystallized in time. Take a picture and make a sculptured Hummel-like tableau out of it. One pothead slacker and one psychopath with a sneer on his face playing video games on a ratty old couch while one has-been slacker stands in the background with a comical expression on his face.
“C’mon guys, don’t fight,” Ant said. Christ, he sounded like a kid begging his parents to stop fighting.
“It’s okay, Ant,” I said, trying to defuse the situation, “It only hurts if it’s true.”
“So you ain’t a writer then, “ Linus said.
I didn’t know when to stop, it seemed. “So do you like your beer with spit or without?”
Linus still hadn’t looked at me for the first time when he said matter-of-factly, “You spit in my beer, boy, and I’ll kill you.”
In for a penny. “Hey, tough guy,” I said, “Nine out of ten people surveyed in this apartment have agreed. You are, indeed, a bad-ass.”
Then I was sitting on the floor of Ant’s back porch, with him gently slapping me awake. There was a coppery taste in my mouth. “Ah, Tony, I’m sorry, man. I should’ve warned you ahead of time about Linus’ temper.”
I shoved Ant back. I wasn’t mad at him. Just at myself, Linus, President Bush, el Nino and anybody else who came to mind. As I got to my feet I became aware of a pain spreading across the right side of my face. I dreaded looking into the mirror later. We went back into Ant’s apartment, through his kitchen and into the living room. The television had been kicked off the old army chest it usually sat on. There was a gaping hole in the screen.